Sun Yuan and Peng Yu Can’t Help Myself (2016) in Tales of Our Time at the Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York.

Launched by the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Chinese Art Initiative at the Guggenheim, Tales of Our Time aims to challenge traditional notions of place and history through diverse forms of storytelling. In preparation for the show, curators Xiaoyu Weng and Hou Hanru traveled across China in search of avant-garde artists outside of the mainstream who actively engage with social issues. Eight selected artists from a wide range of backgrounds examine and interrogate social-political realities in contemporary Greater China. Despite the vast differences in media, style, and perspective of the works, the exhibition engages its audience in an effortless flow of narratives like a collection of exhilarating short stories, offering gripping plots, surprising twists, and satisfying climaxes.

Known for creating spectacles, Hou deploys his trademark style. When entering the exhibition, the viewer immediately encounters Can’t Help Myself (2016) by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, a gigantic, frenetic robot violently splashing thick crimson liquid all over the space. The headlights are white and luminous, reminiscent of operating tables. The glass walls that contain the monster look like ceiling windows in a downpour of blood. The passage, uncomfortably narrow to walk through, forces a confrontation between the beholder and the spectacle.  Tsang Kin-Wah’s video installation, In the End Is the Word (2016), features edited online footage of sea battles over Diaoyu Islands, the subject of a perpetual territorial dispute between China and Japan. The lights in the room strangely point downward. A conspicuous space lies between the screen and the back of the chamber. The design, however, delivers a pleasant surprise when white words begin flowing over the ground like waves washing up on shore.

More sprawling texts lead one downstairs, where further theatrics unfold. Dimly lit by a wide screen and with walls covered in ink drawings, the cinematic space evokes Plato’s cave. The allegorical animation of Sun Xun’s Mythological Time (2016), screened at the center, merges seamlessly with the stunning mythical visuals of the mural-like background. In the adjacent room that showcases Zhuo Tao’s Land of the Throat (2016), two face-to-face screens operate simultaneously, while the viewer sits awkwardly on the tilted, skateboard-shaped ground, experiencing a disoriented reality with the characters. After a breathtaking flag made of seventy-five types of fabric, a couple of secretive taxi conversations, and a series of identically twisted nails, the audience is invited join a relaxing traditional Chinese tea party that is part of an activist work titled Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken (2016) by Yangjiang Group. The activity intends to soothe the anxieties evoked by the other artworks while constructing a harmonious, utopian social environment. One may even test its result with a blood pressure meter, finishing the otherwise intense series of narratives on a humorous note.

The complex composition of some pieces makes it difficult to identify the artists without additional notation, and the labels could be difficult to find. Nonetheless, the connections among the works, the space, and the viewer create a coherent, immersive, and emotionally engaging art experience.

Tales of Our Time is on view at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York through March 10, 2017.

Lux Yuting Bai is an independent curator and writer. She is also a Curatorial Fellow at the School of Visual Arts in New York.

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Sun Xun. Mythological Time, 2016 (installation view); Two-channel color HD animated video projection with sound and powdered pigments in gum arabic and casein paint on mulberry bark paper. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection © Sun Xun, Photo: David Heald.

The exhibition opens with Sun Xun’s Mythological Time, a site-specific installation that weaves visual motifs—a dragon, an opera dancer, a one-winged chunk of coal—into a modern day cave painting. The magnificently drawn mural paintings and animated film use visual techniques taken from the caves of Lascaux and traditional Chinese landscape scrolls to tell a story of the life and death of a coal town.

The symbolism could not be clearer—in one scene, a towering statue of Mao Zedong rises above the coal town. In the next scene, the Mao statue shrinks in the shadow of an exponentially larger monument to Uncle Sam. Here, global capital proves more powerful and unstoppable than even the Communist state. But though Sun’s story is ominous, the storytelling itself suggests a sly playfulness. Sun’s swift lines morph from a phrase of calligraphy into a sinuous dragon and then into a lithe opera dancer in the span of a few seconds, too quick for the slow-moving institutions to apprehend.

Sun Xun. Mythological Time, 2016 (detail); Two-channel color HD animated video projection with sound and powdered pigments in gum arabic and casein paint on mulberry bark paper. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection © Sun Xun, Photo: David Heald.

If Mythological Time tells of an industrial dystopia, Sun Yuan and Peng Yu’s Can’t Help Myself warns of a mechanical one. A large robotic arm flings red paint within a transparent cube. As the exhibition progresses, the paint splatters and dries on the walls, turning brown like dried blood. The robot, programmed to contain the paint within a certain circumference against its natural inclination to flow outward, speaks to fears that skilled labor is increasingly being replaced by machines, and offers a critique of the popularization of factory-scale art production. Can’t Help Myself presents a world in which humans are superfluous, and blood and sinews are replaced by circuits and steel.

Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. Can’t Help Myself, 2016; Kuka industrial robot, stainless steel and rubber, cellulose ether in colored water, lighting grid with Cognex visual-recognition sensors, and polycarbonate wall with aluminum frame. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection © Sun Yuan & Peng Yu. Photo: David Heald.

Perhaps the most explicitly apocalyptic work of the exhibition is Tsang Kin-Wah’s video installation, In The End Is The Word. A quiet harbor gradually fills with ships, jockeying for position like pieces in the Hasbro game Battleship. Tensions heighten as the harbor grows more crowded, noisy, and polluted, until finally a cathartic rush of words—phrases from Derrida, Nietzsche, Sartre, and others—come streaming down, clearing the screen. The moment is a gleeful apocalypse, like the orchestral Guy Fawkes Day explosion in the Wachowski Brothers’s V is for Vendetta or the Biblical flood. There is hope that by clearing away the old system, the ground is cleared for something better. The work ends with a single whale swimming in the bay, spouting mist into the sky.

Tsang Kin-Wah. In The End Is The Word, 2016 (detail); Six-channel video installation, with sound. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Tsang Kin-Wah.

Not all the works in Tales of Our Time are doom and gloom. Unwritten Rules Cannot Be Broken, an installation by the Yangjiang Group, responds to contemporary anxieties not by heightening them, but by offering a haven in the form of an invitation to tea. The artists group installed a miniature tea garden around the gallery, set a table, and invite visitors to take their blood pressure before and after entering the installation.

The remaining works vary in quality. Zhou Tao’s Land of the Throat, a two-channel video that intersperses footage of factories with images of wildlife, struggles to find a unique perspective. Kan Xuan’s Kū Lüè Er, an installation consisting primarily of landscape photos taken on a mobile camera, seems like an afterthought for the actual work—a project proposal for a five-month research trip to Central Asia.

Chia-En Jao. Taxi, 2016 (detail); Color UHD video with sound. Courtesy of Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Collection. © Chia-En Jao.

Chia-En Jao’s Arms no. 31, a tapestry that represents Taiwan’s  multi-faceted identity through a coat of arms woven from textiles from factories across the island, presents a narrative of a national identity ready-made for the United Nations. However, Jao’s technically unremarkable documentary Taxi, in which he simply gets into taxis and talks with his drivers, presents a quiet challenge to the curatorial project. The artists in Tales of Our Times provoke common anxieties of the international elite—climate change, AI takeovers, appeals to “mindfulness”—in their narrative and conceptual works because they belong to it. The “Our” in the exhibition title, as global as it is, is exclusive. Only Jao, who brings Guggenheim visitors into Taipei taxis, invites others—his drivers—to tell their tales of the time.

Tales of Our Time is on view at the Guggenheim Museum in New York through March 10, 2017.